Silo structure and Url structure

[accessted]

Hello guys,

Been out of the loop a little while. Trying to get back into some online stuff again. I am going to do a Lead gen site. I am starting locally and then going to expand if all goes well.. I see a lot has changed just in the last few months with SEO and with GMB. I have been reading up and trying to catch up.. So I may have some questions in here if that is ok.. 

I really want to nail my on page.

So I am attaching a little doodle drawing for my silo structure. 

We will say for example this is a plumbing site. 

I will  have two main menu tabs. All others will go in the footer.(Contact us,about etc.)

I will have a services tab with drop down menu and a locations tab no drop down menu

Services will have maybe 5 different services like toilet repair, showers, faucets et..

Locations will have all my location States and then when you click on the state it will bring up the cities. 

 

So I am a little confused on the silo. 

Home will link to each page Services/Location

Under services each service page will link to another service page? ( I will not be trying to rank the service pages)

 

Under the locations page I will have all the states listed and linked to a page with all cities in that state. 

home.com

home.com/nc

Home.com/nc/charlotte/plumbers 

Is this structure look good?

So to silo these do I take my city page and just link it back to my state page for each individual state/city? My individual city pages are the ones I want to rank. or do I just link each city page back to the main home page?

 

I may be over thinking this but I want to try to get a nice solid silo structure that is easy and helps my ranking? 

 

 

 

 

[mki]

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I may be over thinking this but I want to try to get a nice solid silo structure that is easy and helps my ranking? 

You are but it looks fine in my opinion. I don't think that's problematic unless there's extra cities or states you don't care about where you created pages for no reason. A very minor problem I see here would be if you have a state where you only have one city page. That's kind of silly because that state page is not needed but technically, the silo structure says it should be there. The pros and cons get kind of weird in that case. Under normal circumstances, the city page will link to a state page, which links to the other cities in that state, and will help the other cities. If there's only one city, it's kind of a waste but it still links to the index page so it will help the other states and cities in those states.

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My individual city pages are the ones I want to rank.

That's where you want the external links to point to ideally. To the pages you want to rank. Ideally, all pages on the site should have a clickable path to the pages you want to rank. So getting a link to any page on the site will help but unless it's the exact page(s) you want to rank, it's less direct.

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I just link each city page back to the main home page?

It's likely you have a link in the header (not the HTML header, the visual header inside the body tag) that does that already, almost guaranteed if this is a WP site.

[Mike Friedman]

There is a couple of ways you can do this.

Obviously, the city pages are already going to link to the home page, services, and back to the starting location page through the navigation.

1. You could just leave it like that and you would be fine.
2. You could link the city pages back to the state page with a "Search for plumbers in other cities/towns in [Insert State Link Here]" type of comment. 
3. The other option would be to link to all of the other cities in the state on the city page. This is kind of what Craigslist does. If you go to Craigslist and select your town, you will see a list of other nearby towns to the right you can select.

So you could make a column in the sidebar or put something in the body under your main content that says something like "Search for plumbers throughout Pennsylvania" and then it lists all the other cities in the state.

I would probably go with option 2 or a hybrid of 2 and 3. 

Option 2 makes sure any links the city pages acquire are helping to rank the state page which then flows into the city pages. Option 3 potentially helps the city pages a little more, but if you have a state with 85 towns listed that gets a little messy and really splits up the linkjuice from the individual city pages.

For a hybrid, you could do option 2 and then include 7-8 of the most popular cities in that state as well. 

 

[accessted]

Awesome guys.. I may just do option 1 or maybe 2. My state page will probably be thin and don't really need to rank it or juice it up. I am mainly concerned about the city pages. I see the value in option 2 though.. 

 

Thanks for your help guys...